I need to figure out if I can get this to work. I have a HP P2000 Storage system, connected to 2 x HP DL360 G7 through SAS. Then I got an HP Autoloader with connected through SAS too.
Will I, in ESXi 4.1, be able to mount both the tapedrive and tapelibary to a VM? If yes, How?
I've tried my self, and read a lot of VMware forum posts. It seems like SAS isn't supported in ESXi 4.0 and forward, and due to connectivity problems from supporting multiple LUNs (both autoloader drive LUN and libary LUN) over the same HBA. You can run a commando i cli that enables the LUN that otherwise appears and offline, but the connection it self is still very unstable, and the connection to the autoloader fails whenever you want to run an operation?
Any guidance available out there, on how I solve this?
I've done a temp. setup with an extra setup, running a 3rd server with a SAS HBA and the backup software. Gbit ethernet and the SAS HBA directly connected to the autoloader. The problem here is very poor performance (220 mb / minut), since the data has to go from the VMs, over ethernet, and onto the backup server in order to get to the autoloader through SAS. Can this setup somehow be altered in order to increase the performance?
I've successfully run standalone tape drives via the SCSI passthrough on ESXi. This is different because this is a multi-LUN situation. Which SAS controller are you using? Is the the HP-branded LSI controller? If so, this VMWare forum post may help.
Short of that, I'd stick with a dedicated backup server. I run a standalone server with an HP LTO-3 tape drive to backup my VMWare environment, and while the rates depend heavily on the type of data being backed up, I get ~2 Gigabytes/minute speed in Backup Exec.